Chapter 7
seven
Sage
The Harvest Festival runs two days and the second day is gold from start to finish.
I'm up before Hops and I'm at the tasting room window drinking his coffee and watching Silver Ridge wake up below us in the valley.
The festival tents went up yesterday, the main street closed to vehicles, the smell of woodsmoke and frying onions coming up from the market stalls even this early.
The agricultural families have been here since five, the old logging families and the newer arrivals setting up side by side the way Hops told me this town operates, which is: together, imperfectly, with genuine warmth.
He appears in the tasting room doorway in a brewery t-shirt, looking for his coffee.
"I have it," I say.
"I see that." He leans against the doorframe, not making a move to reclaim it. His hair is slightly disordered and he is, as he is every morning, unreasonably comfortable in his own existence. "Today's the day."
"Today's the day," I agree, taking a steady breath.
The festival entry is in the conditioning tank, ready.
The pairing components are prepped in the pub kitchen — the aged cheddar sourced from a farm forty minutes east, the roasted root vegetables I talked through the kitchen on Wednesday, the fermented hot honey in its jar, the small pickle accompaniment that was my last addition.
I supervised, described, corrected, tasted at every stage, told the line cook when the carrots needed another ten minutes and when the honey needed more time over low heat. In my humble opinion, I directed the preparation of the best pairing I've designed in three years.
Below us, the crow is back in the alley, negotiating with the delivery driver. It's getting what it wants. It always gets what it wants.
The festival is everything he described and louder. By noon the main street is full.
The Harvest Festival draws people from the valley, from the outlying farms, from towns up and down the highway, and the result is Silver Ridge at its fullest expression: the Brooks Boutique Hotel's front porch lined with harvest flowers that Maple organized, the memorial garden at the east end of the main street where Flint Morrison's stonework catches the afternoon light, the smell of Nash Brennan's smoking brisket stand mixing with the apple cider from the Kowalski farm three stalls down.
I find Autumn MacKenzie at the environmental consulting display near the town hall and she is exactly as Hops described her — “warm and organized and very deliberate” — and she introduces me to Garrett, who shakes my hand with the grip of a man who works on cars and asks what I make of the saison pairing, because Bev told him about it, because in Silver Ridge everything Bev knows becomes community property within forty-eight hours.
Ryder Lindstrom is at the Brewing Company's tent with Celeste, who is talking to three people simultaneously with the precise energy of someone managing multiple channels at once.
She looks up and spots my notebook and gives me the specific look of one person who takes notes about flavor to another.
I make a mental note to have coffee with her.
Nash and Maple are near the hotel with their three dogs, who are creating the kind of organized chaos that suggests this has happened at every festival they've attended.
Atlas and Willa find me near the brewery tent at one o'clock. Willa is exactly as direct as Hops said she'd be, and she looks at me with the appraising efficiency of an adjuster calculating a risk assessment, and then she says: "You're staying."
"I think so," I say.
"Good," she says.
Atlas looks at me. He says: "He's a good person."
Hops is at the bar being Hops: talking to people, refilling glasses, remembering names, being the specific warm presence that this room is built around. He catches my eye across the room and grins, which I find unreasonably attractive.
The Kowalski apple cider is excellent. I taste it and know it. The Kowalski family has been doing this for decades and the cider is confident and clean and it deserves every festival ribbon it's ever won.
The judges take notes.
At four o'clock Maureen Kowalski, who runs the cider operation and has silver hair and the bearing of a woman who has judged more competitions than she's entered, finds me at the bar.
"The pairing component," she says. "The judges are asking about it."
"It's mine," I say.
"And the beer is his."
"Yes."
"They want to know if it's a single entry or a collaboration."
"Collaboration," I say, and Hops, who has appeared at my shoulder without me noticing, says the same word at the same moment.
Maureen looks at us both. "I thought as much," she says, and goes back to the judges.
The announcement comes at five, in the full brewery with most of Silver Ridge present, the amber light of late October doing the thing it does here — turning the room warm and specific, the cedar walls and the tap handles and the stainless steel glinting.
Bev has been running the floor at full capacity and she looks pleased in the contained way that means something very good is happening.
“The Harvest Festival Beverage Award goes to the Wild Sullivan Collaboration — Silver Ridge Brewing Company and Sage Wild.”
The room makes the noise rooms make when the right thing happens.
I'm standing at the bar with a glass of the Wild Sullivan when Hops comes to stand next to me. Not in front of me, not with a speech, not with any of the visible apparatus of the moment. Just next to me, at the bar, with his own glass.
"You won," he says.
"We won!" I say.
hOPS puts his glass down and he reaches under the bar and he puts something on the bar between us: a small ring, simple, gold, with a thin channel set with something dark and amber — a piece of beer bottle glass from the first batch he brewed, he tells me later, tumbled smooth and set in gold by a jeweller.
"I know it's fast," he says.
"It's very fast." My heart is trembling as I try to contain my excitement.
I look at the ring. I look at him. The brewery is full of people and noise and the smell of grain and malt and the fermented hot honey that his kitchen made for us.
Every person in this room is someone he knows by name.
He built this. He built all of this and he kept it honest and small and genuinely good, and I have been, without quite deciding to be, building something in the same direction.
"Yes," I say.
"I haven't finished asking," he says.
"I know." I pick up the ring. "Ask me anyway."
"Sage Wild," he says, "will you stay in Silver Ridge and marry me and argue about pairings with me for the rest of our lives?"
"Yes," I say. "That's still yes."
He puts the ring on my finger. Hops grins at me over the noise of the festival.
"I have something to tell you," I say.
"What?"
"I'm going to open a supper club. Twelve seats, one seating, seasonal menu." I look at him. "I want to use the brewery kitchen when you're closed."
Hops looks at me for a long moment. "You can use it whenever you want," he says. "It's yours." He pulls me in and kisses me.